Abstract: In a manner as strategic as it is playful, the prose poem “Apologie” sets and summarizes the defining coordinates of the Mémoires d’un veuf into which it is inserted and more broadly ensures what one can understand to be the “collection effect.” Verlaine endeavors to specify the features of his “widower’s” ethos and to explain the terms of his appropriation of the genre while negotiating with his reader the clauses of a poetic agreement that breaks with the traditional lyrical contract.
